The American Prospect

A monthly political journal of liberal though. Contains articles that generate debate, further ideas, and set agendas; and provides a forum for working through the controversies and hard choices facing all Americans. Includes regular topics and features.

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Articles from Vol. 22, No. 3, April

MONICA POTTS: With all the revolutions throughout the Arab world, one thing is clear: Facebook and Twitter are really as life-changing as we think they are. GABRIEL ARANA: There's no doubt that they've eased social interaction, but I don't see a...

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne knows racism when he sees it, and he isn't afraid to publicly castigate the most recent agents of race hate. Horne is an outspoken opponent of racism in a state roiling with tensions about "illegal aliens" and "anchor...

For those of us concerned about women's health, the first few months of the 112th Congress have felt a lot like the early days of the George W. Bush administration. Republicans have introduced a cascade of anti-choice bills, each more appalling than...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Call it the theology of Grover Norquist. "The other side isn't stupid; they're evil," Norquist, chair of Americans for Tax Reform and board member of the American Conservative Union, told a crowd at the Conservative Political...

Bill Owens, a 52-year-old small)business owner, loves his Seattle neighborhood of South Park for its racial and ethnic diversity. Owens has become close to his neighbors of Vietnamese, Korean, Mexican, Guatemalan, and Jamaican descent. Yet Owens and...

Ecuadorian-born Gaby Pacheco was brought to the U.S. by her parents in 1993, when she was 7. By the time Pacheco was 18 and a student at Miami Dade College in Florida, she had started advocating for education rights for undocumented youth like her....

In Oakland, California, the high school dropout rate is 40 percent. Nearly one-quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds live in poverty. The city's youth clearly faces daunting odds, but efforts to organize young Oakland residents demonstrate the power of local...

Malaika Jenkins, a 36-year-old African American marketing director, recently moved from Southern California to Oak Park, a racially diverse first-ring suburb at the west edge of Chicago. It's a community where Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie-style homes...

In the past 70 years, there has been a tide shift in the publicly shared attitudes of white Americans toward African Americans. Some of the earliest public-opinion polls in the 1940s found that an overwhelming majority (about two-thirds) of whites...

"Race talk" has occupied a contradictory place in Barack Obama's political strategy. On the one hand, Obama has made it newly salient. The speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 that elevated him to political stardom focused on his vision...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Life of Franklin Pierce about his friend and Bowdoin College classmate who was running for president. If they wished, Hawthorne wrote, Americans could elect Pierce's opponent and "retard...

The story of the Democratic Party--at least during those times when the party has advanced progressive causes--has been a story of expanding the franchise. From the time of Andrew Jackson, when Democrats eliminated the property requirements for white...

In 1990, sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote a provocative article for this magazine, Race-Neutral Politics and the Democratic Coalition," arguing that Democrats should de-emphasize race-specific policies like affirmative action in favor of race-neutral...

In 2007, Antonio Jackson, an African American worker at the Rent-a-Center store in Washoe County, Nevada, concluded that he had been repeatedly denied promotion to sales manager because of his race. He complained to his store manager, the corporate...

When 19-year-old Tyler Waltz was a child, Fairfield, Ohio, was a typical Midwestern town. In the small suburb 20 miles north of Cincinnati, life centered on sports and Catholic festivals. Teenagers hung out at the town's strip malls, its three bowling...

In July 2010, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released Media, Race and Obama's First Year. The white paper detailed what many already knew: The American media often does a terrible job of covering racial issues--and having...

Shane Tawr doesn't remember exactly why he first decided to try his hand at chicken farming. Tawr had a government job in Milwaukee but wanted relief from the city's bustle. He decided in 2004 to head down to the Ozarks, buy a chicken farm, and work...

Fifty years ago, hundreds of young white and black Americans united to desegregate buses across the South. These Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, drew vivid attention to the inhumanity of segregation, and their collective action marked a turning...

The following collection of essays offers a fresh assessment of the nature of racism in 21stcentury America and an examination of opportunities for healing it. The subject could not be more important. In many ways, race is a stain that runs across...

After the policemen had sodomized the bus driver with a broomstick, and after one of the officers had sent a cell-phone video of the attack to other bus drivers in downtown Cairo to make clear that the cops could do as they pleased, and after someone...

The Republican-led House has passed a budget cutting more than $60 billion in domestic outlay this fiscal year, in a still fragile economy. Senior Republicans in both houses have also proposed slashing Social Security, setting up what should be a slam...